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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is undergoing a major culture change, and nowhere is that impact being felt more than in the food industry. While visibly preparing new regulations to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the agency is quietly becoming much more inspection-oriented and enforcement-minded, even before FSMA is fully implemented. This trend will only continue as FDA completes FSMA rulemaking and begins enforcing the act.

This cultural change means that the practices that made food companies successful in the past may not be enough to make them successful today. Companies must be fully prepared for today’s FDA inspections or expect to face enforcement consequences. This article outlines FDA’s recent increased emphasis on inspections and enforcement, and discusses the steps food companies can take to get ready.

Fresh water that now tumbles down the eastern flank of the Andes mountains to the Amazon basin and eventually the Atlantic Ocean will instead move west through the mountains to irrigate a patch of desert on Peru's coast. It will then drain into the Pacific Ocean.

The Herculean project to reverse the flow of water and realise a century-old dream is in many ways the most important water work ever in Peru. It could serve as a blueprint for the kind of construction projects needed to tackle worsening water scarcity.

Call it extreme engineering in the age of global warming.

"All of this will be green," said engineer Giovanni Palacios, looking out over miles of brown shrubbery at a construction site he oversees for the Brazilian firm Odebrecht.

Palacios is the director of the Olmos Irrigation Project, an ambitious and - until it starts in 2014 - unproven vision with a $500 million price tag.

It has included drilling a 20 kilometre tunnel through the formidable Andes to capture abun…

A new visitor's center has been built overlooking the entrance to the locks on the Atlantic side of the canal. Ships waiting to go through the canal can be seen in the distance as well as the site where new locks are being built. Mimi Whitefield / For The Miami Herald